Academics standing up publicly to Elsevier! This is very exciting. Thanks, Tim Gowers! Thanks, everyone else who has been working for open access for quite some time now!

On the topic of open access, I thought I might briefly address some of the most common non-financial/technical objections I hear raised about it. (I'm excluding the financial/technical ones because I'm not qualified to argue them in detail; let's just take it as given that the truth lies somewhere between "the current situation is the best of all possible worlds" and "we could switch to an everything-is-free-for-everyone model overnight if it wasn't for greedy capitalists", and deal solely with objections to open access as an ideal.)

Hardly anyone outside academia wants to read academic research anyway.

First of all, this can't just be asserted. Every year, JSTOR turns away 150 goddamn million search requests. Even if 99% of those search requests were from idly websurfing bozos who would have immediately clicked the "Back" button upon not seeing a picture of Katy Perry, that still leaves one and a half million serious requests.

Secondly, even if it were true, that's not an argument against allowing access to people who do want to read the stuff. And if the argument is supposed to be "Hardly anyone wants to etc., so it hardly seems worth addressing the problem" then clearly, the only option people like me have is to keep agitating until some worth is perceived in addressing the problem.

If we allowed everyone to read our papers, we'd have to dumb them down and include so much catch-up information that journals would become bloated and progress would be slowed.

No. This is a straight-up misconception and I don't know why it's so common. Maybe the people who believe this are confusing the call for "open access" (that is, letting non-academics read academic journals) for "greater accessibility" (that is, writing for the general public rather than fellow researchers). If so, let me reassure them: we want the former, not the latter. We don't want things rewritten For Dummies. We don't want editorial control. We don't want everything put on Reddit and voted up and down based on how cute the lead author's cat is. We want academic research to go on just as it always has, jargon and all, except with us allowed to read the results too. The fact that the material is written at a high level is exactly why we want to read it. If we just wanted to read summarized and sensationalized highlights, we'd be content with Slate.

If we allowed everyone to read our papers, the information would be twisted and misused by anti-vaccine activists, creationists, demagogues, bloggers, etc.

The world is already full of con artists, rabble rousers and dupes. There is no conceivable mechanism by which making better information more available worsens this situation. If anything, it should ameliorate the problem: the activists outside academia trying to refute the tidal waves of bullshit sloshing around the noosphere would certainly benefit from being dealt in to the non-bullshit game.

Arguments like these boil down to one single, patronizing principle: non-academics can't handle academic writing. This isn't true, and it's getting falser every day. We're allies, not enemies. One day things will be better, and I mean for everyone.